The Thirty-Nine Steps: Hannay on the Run

Hannay's flat is "the first floor in a new block behind Langham Place", near Portland Place. One evening his neighbour Franklin Scudder slips in, terrified, with a story of anarchists, a plot to assassinate the Greek premier Karolides in London on 15 June, and a secret society called the Black Stone. Hannay hides him for four days. Then he comes home to find Scudder pinned to the floor by a knife. With the killers watching the street and the police sure to suspect him, Hannay takes Scudder's coded notebook and decides to disappear until mid-June.

Location precision: The block of flats is invented; the pin marks Langham Place.

Next morning Hannay bribes the milkman for his cap and white overall and walks out past the watchers carrying the cans. He dumps the disguise in a side street, sprints along the Euston Road and jumps into the last carriage of the 7.10 from St Pancras as it pulls out, without a ticket. The guard writes him one to Newton-Stewart, a name that happens to come into his head. Hannay spends the trip trying to crack Scudder's cipher and falls asleep. The station's great Victorian shed still stands, now home to Eurostar trains.

Visitor guidance: St Pancras International is open daily; the Barlow train shed is best seen from the upper concourse.

At Dumfries Hannay changes into the slow Galloway train among hill farmers back from market, and gets off at a tiny station "set right in the heart of a bog", where the stationmaster is digging potatoes. He sleeps at a shepherd's cottage by a waterfall, then strides south next morning "skirting the side of a high hill which the herd had called Cairnsmore of Fleet". Doubling back by train, he reads in the Scotsman that the police think the Portland Place murderer has fled north. Over the next days he cracks Scudder's cipher at a moorland inn and plays hide-and-seek on these hills with a spotter aeroplane.

Visitor guidance: The summit is a national nature reserve; NatureScot runs a year-round visitor centre at Dromore, on the reserve's southern edge.

Disguised as a roadman, Hannay fools his pursuers, steals a car from a silly London acquaintance, and finally blunders into a lonely moorland farmhouse whose kindly bald owner, an amateur archaeologist, hides him from the police. Then Hannay notices how the old man hoods his eyes like a bird of prey: he is the chief of the Black Stone. Locked in a storeroom full of explosives, Hannay blows his way out with a lump of lentonite and staggers off, half-poisoned by the fumes, to hide with the roadman Turnbull. The house is unnamed and imaginary.

Location precision: The farmhouse is invented and Buchan gives no place name for it.

On 12 June, recovered, Hannay walks with a drover named Hislop and his cattle over the pass and "down the sunny vale of Annan" to Moffat — a full day for a dozen miles. He eats in a humble public house, walks two miles to the junction on the main line and nearly misses the night express south after falling asleep on the hillside. Then Crewe, Birmingham, Reading and a little Berkshire station, where Sir Walter Bullivant of the Foreign Office is fly-fishing. Moffat is still a spa town on the A701.

Location precision: The novel names Moffat; the main-line junction two miles away was Beattock, whose station has closed.

Karolides has been shot; Hannay is cleared. But on the night of 14 June, restless, he punches an old acquaintance who shouts "murderer" in Jermyn Street, outruns a policeman across St James's Park and reaches Sir Walter's house in Queen Anne's Gate, where ministers are meeting with a French general over naval plans. The First Sea Lord walks past him — and something in his eyes says he recognises Hannay. A phone call proves the real First Sea Lord went to bed half an hour ago: the spies have the plans.

Location precision: Buchan names the street but not the house number.

Visitor guidance: A quiet street of early 18th-century houses between St James's Park and Westminster; the houses are private.

Scudder's note — "Thirty-nine steps, I counted them — High tide 10.17 p.m." — leads to the Ruff, a chalk headland in Kent, where one villa's private stair has exactly 39 steps to the beach and a yacht waits offshore. Three men there play tennis like ordinary Englishmen; on 15 June Hannay walks in and arrests them, and the yacht is seized. The Ruff is invented, but Buchan wrote the book while convalescing at St Cuby, a clifftop house in Broadstairs, where his young daughter counted the steps to the beach: there were really 78.

Location precision: The Ruff is fictional; the pin marks St Cuby on Cliff Promenade, Broadstairs, whose stairway inspired the title.